The trend in recent years has been towards convenience in food preparations and towards reduced-calorie and/or sugar-free foods. In line with these trends sugar-free instant puddings are desirable. As known in the art instant puddings are prepared without cooking by simply mixing a dry powder with milk. While sugar-containing instant puddings have met with consumer acceptance both in terms of ease of preparation and organoleptic quality, attempts at formulating sugar-free instant pudding mixes present problems related to poor dispersibility of the dry mix in milk.
Current sugar-containing, instant pudding mixes, such as described in commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. No. 4,469,712, contain in excess of 70% by weight of sugar and less than about 20% by weight of pre-gelatinized starch. These mixes do not encounter significant dispersion problems since the sugar particles will effectively separate the starch particles and upon mixing with milk each starch particle will swell independently and uniformly rather than sticking together. This patent further teaches that the use of powdered sugar and relatively fine-grind (greater than 50%, minus 400 U.S. mesh), pre-gelatinized starch particles will improve the texture and gloss of the prepared pudding.
Commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. No. 4,361,592 also relates to improving the texture and appearance of instant pudding also using a combination of fine-grind (greater than 50%, minus 400 U.S. mesh), pregelatinized starch and pwdered sugar.
The prior art does not, however, disclose the formulation of dry, sugar-free instant pudding mixes which are readily dispersible in cold milk and which produce a pudding having commercially-acceptable texture (i.e. an absence of lumps).